Five People Jacen Solo Still Loves
by Lyraeinne
Summary: There are some things even time can't wash away. JacenTenel Ka, Alanna, Anakin, Ben, Jaina


16

**Title**: Five People Jacen Solo Still Loves

**Author**: Lyraeinne

**Rating**: PG-13

**Warnings**: Angst. Violence.

**Era**: pre-Legacy

**Pairings/Characters**: Jacen/Tenel Ka, Anakin, Jaina, Ben, Alanna

**Summery**: Five people who matter.

**Author's Note**: So, this took me about a million years to write. It's technically set in the post-DN/pre-Legacy era, but I've pretty much been running on spoilers for everything post Betrayal, so likely quite a few details in the foreshadowing will be off. Possible OOC in places.

**Disclaimer**: Jacen Solo does not belong to me. Nor does the rest of Star Wars. Sadly. Five Things concept also not originated by me.

**1. Tenel Ka Djo**

It was an unavoidable aspect of her position.

An irreversible clause in a contract signed from the moment she'd ascended the Hapan throne. She had no choice in the matter. Her every move was watched. Every step analyzed. Every expression recorded. Documented. Dissected.

It was completely, absolutely necessary for her to take other men to her bed, at least on occasion, if they were to have any hope of protecting the secrecy of their relationship. Jacen's safety depended on it. Their daughter's safety depended on it.

Tenel Ka always says what is true. Inarguable. And Jacen is a man of logic, and he understands necessity. He knows that it gives them a deliberate advantage, a ready-made cover should any unknowable details slip through their carefully constructed screen of deceit.

It becomes a kind of game, between them. He helps her to pick them on occasion, choosing for pliability, for attractiveness, for status. For the most unlikely, the most _outrageous_ candidates. Every idle whisper in the court is a victory; every scandal breaking across the holonet is a reason for silent celebration.

"That one," he says, when they sit in the overhanging garden together, hands twined inside the folds of her skirt, just out of view of the camera situated above them. A large group of youthful male courtiers cavort below them in the courtyard. Like most Hapans he is blond and pale-skinned, with plump, girlish lips. The muscles of his naked thighs tighten and release as he moves.

"No," Tenel Ka says, brushing the first two joints of his fingers with her thumb. "He's too young, Jacen."

"What's wrong with young?" he asks, watching the boy leap once again before landing on all fours, gyrating his hips back and forth. "They'll do whatever you want when they're that age."

"Young ones may fall in love," Tenel Ka says. Alanna squeals up ahead where she plays in the grass, rolling in the flowers with undignified delight. "That is the last thing that we want, Jacen."

When her words wash over him he closes his eyes, and he lets them slip across his consciousness like serpents. Three days later, when there is only hyperspace that spirals in blue and orange shifting dots in front of his eyes he thinks of them again, letting them curl together and harden, deep in the facets of his memory.

For two years they continue in this way. He turns his holonet console to one station every morning, and there is Tenel Ka smiling over the screen and never once letting one breath of Jacen Solo slide through the cracks in her mask of young men, and somewhere he imagines her thinking of him, continuing with his mission and sometimes visiting the family that he's allowed to have, and not one breath of Tenel Ka ever slides through his mask of indifference.

He dreams, sometimes, that he can taste each one of them on her skin. Map the curving lines of their fingertips on her belly, and feel every damp mark of dried sweat in the hollows of her collarbones.

It happens only once, one night when he's alone again and thinking of a child who will never call him daddy, and Danni Quee walks into the pilots lounge, with her smile and her golden highlights and the florescent glow glinting blindingly off her teeth, and he thinks of Tenel Ka on Hapes, wrapped up in teenage boys and million credit sheets and suddenly he finds no reason to resist when Danni's delicately filed nails creep across the inside of his thigh.

The next morning a file comes in under several encrypted passwords and in it is a detailed report of the Hapan court, strictly dry and uninteresting and nothing at all out of the ordinary from what a queen would send to a Jedi, and then in the middle there is a tiny holograph of a little girl he almost doesn't recognize, crouching in a rich courtyard with a tiny colony of insects surrounded her in a distinctly odd pattern. _The children are well protected_, the picture says but Jacen knows Tenel Ka and the words blur in his eyes and say _I love you so much I would risk exposure to know you are smiling_.

Jacen closes the file and begins to cry.

He tucks the hair behind her ears before he kisses her, and she bites down on the edge of his wrist, teeth pressing in just hard enough to sting, and he feels raw anger in her skin, white-hot and razor-sharp and simmering, just underneath the pads of his thumbs, and it's absolution that she wants, for betraying him again and again.

It all turns to ash in his fingers, curling away and gone because all there really ever was was Tenel Ka, and beneath every broken layer of guilt and loss is a smile that he would still burn alive just to see.

**2. Ben Skywalker**

It had been too much, perhaps, to begin to hope that Ben would actually make this easy.

He was standing in the middle of the kitchen, thoroughly blocking all exit paths with his 1.5 meter frame, arms folded across his chest, his face a study in indignant incredulity. "Why?" he demanded. "Where are you going and why can't I come with you?"

In retrospect, Jacen realized that his first mistake was immediately using the discouraging brush-off. "We just got _back_," he said, tossing the rag he'd been using to clean the counter into the disposer. "You really want to spend two weeks playing mini holochess in a three meter wide cockpit with me _again_?"

"Yes," Ben said, of course, his face unflaggingly serious.

There were times when Jacen missed the days when all it took to please him were nature walks by the river and fast cloud car rides. "Look," he said. "You can't come with me everywhere. Sometimes I just have stuff I need to do by myself. Grownup stuff. Trust me on this one. You'll be much better off here."

"_Grownup_ stuff?" Ben said, his eyebrows raising even further. "Give me a break. How old do you think I _am_?"

"Right, I forgot," Jacen said. "Eleven whole years old. Wow, Ben. Remind me next time to let you decode the hydrofibrillators."

Ben's freckled face darkened again. "I find your tone unnecessarily demeaning," he said.

"And I find yours unnecessarily annoying," Jacen said.

"I guess we're even then," Ben said snottily.

"I guess so," Jacen said, and turned on the cleaning droid. He left the kitchen and headed back into the living room, picking up the holonet control from where Ben had flung it, flipping it away from The Amazing Adventures of the Millennium Falcon to a game that looked vaguely like Smashball. It was a little frustrating to feel so purposeless, with the added annoyance that it gave him no excuse to send Ben home and shut down the discussion entirely. He was away from his apartment so often that it was odd how little he had to do with himself when he was here.

Ben wandered back after a few minutes with a bowl of tiny boonta chips, throwing himself past Jacen back onto the sofa. He folded his arms across his chest and affected a theatrically sulky expression. Jacen picked his datapad up off the table and called up a mission report, choosing to ignore the display.

"Okay," Ben said loudly, after thirty-nine seconds of mournful sighing failed to get Jacen's attention. "I get it, okay?"

"You get what?" Jacen said, without looking up at him.

"You have a girlfriend right?" Ben said. "And you want to go see her. Without your stupid little cousin tagging along."

"Right," Jacen said. He clicked down on the scroll and deleted a few odd-looking characters pasted into the middle of one of his sentences. "That makes sense."

"Sure it does," Ben said. "You're really cool. And when you're cool, you're supposed to have a girlfriend. I _never_ see you with any girls. Therefore you must have one that's not here. That's a _secret_."

"I never see you with any girls either," Jacen said.

"That's different," said Ben. "I'm _eleven_. Perve."

"Well, whoever told you that is stupid. Lots of cool people don't have girlfriends. And I happen to be one of them."

"Name one!" Ben demanded. "Besides _you_."

"Zekk," Jacen said, frowning as he scrolled down to his next paragraph, which was now a mess of gibberish. "I've known him since I was younger than you. Never seen him with a girlfriend."

"I said _cool_," Ben said. "And he's with Jaina _all_ the time. You don't really think they're not totally keeping it a secret, do you?"

"You don't even know what that _means_," Jacen said. "And no, I really don't think they are. What possible reason would they have to keep it a secret?"

Ben paused, clearly at an end point in his logic. "For fun?" he suggested.

"Fun?" Jacen said. He looked up at Ben over the datapad. "You really think that would be fun?"

"How would I know?" Ben said. "People seem to think it is in holovids."

"Well, in real life people who are in love generally like to actually be together," Jacen said. "When it's a secret, you really can't be. Or people would find out. Which would defeat the purpose of keeping it a secret."

"Well, that's stupid," Ben said firmly. "In the holovids they're always together. Except behind pillars and stuff."

"Right," Jacen said, trying to quell his rising irritation before Ben could pick up on it in the force. "Behind pillars. Let me know how that one works out."

"You would probably know," Ben said sagely.

"Hey," Jacen said, pressing the delete key as hard as he could. "I have a great idea. Why don't you go do some actual homework? Or something? Anything?"

Ben folded his arms across his chest again. "You didn't give me any," he said.

"Right," Jacen said. "My mistake. Go practice then. Lightsaber form. You're getting sloppy."

"Since when?" Ben challenged. "And I can't do form without a partner, dumb head."

Jacen threw the datapad down on the table, finally. "Fine," he said. "You want my attention, you have it. What the kriff is going on, here, Ben?"

Ben stared at him, blankly. "What do you mean what's going on?"

"I mean what's the matter with you? I've left you behind plenty of times, and I've never seen you like this before."

Ben scowled at the wall behind Jacen's head, refusing to meet his gaze. "I just wanna do fun stuff," he said. "Here is _boring_."

"Right," Jacen said. "Wrong answer, kid."

Ben looked away again, his small face visibly tightening.

"Hey," Jacen said, softening his voice a little. "_Ben_."

"They think I don't remember things," Ben said finally, looking down at his dirty fingernails.

"Okay," Jacen said. Now they were getting somewhere. "What things?"

"Like when I was little," Ben said. "Like what they said, when they brought me back after the war."

"What did they say?" Jacen asked.

Ben scowled a little harder, his blue eyes dark. "They said we'd be a family again," he said. "Dad said we'd be together now, and he'd never let someone take me away again."

Something clicked in Jacen's mind, and he felt a slow, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Oh," he said.

"They like to pretend we are," Ben said. "They make me dinner after lessons, and they always remember what my favorite things are. They ask me what I think about things, and they act like they actually want to listen. Like they really _care_."

"Well maybe they do, Ben," Jacen said, gently. "Did you ever think of that?"

Ben laughed humorlessly. "Right," he said. "They care until the sithing comm rings. And it's _always_ important. Somebody blew something up, or got kidnapped, or _died_, and then they leave. They _always_ leave."

"Oh," Jacen said again.

Ben looked up at him again, twisting one of the strings dangling off the sofa. "You probably think it's totally stupid, right?"

Jacen leaned back against the sofa, putting his feet up on the table. "No," he said. "I actually don't."

Ben's face relaxed slightly. "I know it selfish," he said. "I mean, it's their _job_. Saving the galaxy. One kid is just… nothing. Next to all the other kids they have to save."

"Well, it's," he hesitated. "Look. Believe it or not… it was that way with my parents too."

"Really?" Ben said curiously. "Uncle _Han_?"

"Yeah," said Jacen. "There was this… place they used to send us. It was called Anoth. It was cold. Ugly. No real atmosphere. We had to stay inside all the time."

"Sounds lubed," Ben said dryly.

"Yeah. We hated it. They sent us there for two years after we were born. Then whenever there was a new war, or a plague, or hell, _anything_ remotely dangerous anywhere near Coruscant, they'd send us there again. Sometimes for months. With nobody else to talk to except Winter. She was our nanny."

"Well what did you do?" Ben said.

"What could I do?" Jacen said. "They're my parents. They were trying to protect me, and they thought that was the only way they could do it. No matter how much I wish things were different, I didn't get to decide. I wish I could tell you something different, but I can't. Running away from it won't help, Ben."

Ben looked away again, focusing his gaze on the bare windows and their feigned cityscape beyond the glass. "I like being with you," he said quietly.

"I know," Jacen said. He let his hand rest briefly on Ben's small, bony shoulder. "You just can't be with me all the time."

"I don't want to go home," Ben said fervently. "Please don't make me, Jacen. _Please_."

Jacen sighed. "You're going to have to eventually," he said.

"Just tonight then," Ben said. "_Please_. I won't be annoying anymore. I'll make my own dinner!"

"Alright," he said, finally. "Alright. But I'm taking you back tomorrow, before I leave."

"Fine," Ben said, but the fight was gone from his voice. His face had relaxed finally, into an expression Jacen could only identify as pure relief.

He gave Ben's shoulder a squeeze, and then he stood up. "I'm going to go take a shower," he said. "Try to do something productive while I'm gone, okay?"

"Okay," he said, and he smiled up at Jacen.

Something pulled inside, just slightly as he walked away, and in the back of his mind Jacen wondered if he'd ever had Ben's best interests in mind at all.

**3. Alanna Djo**

Letting his fingers curl around the assassin's head was one of the easiest things he'd ever done; pinning her to the wall while she fights him like a fluttermoth on a pin as the back of her spine slides into his palm. As if every curving knob of bone was made to fit into his hands. For _this_ moment only.

When her legs give way he lets her crumple down at his feet and finally, finally, there's nothing left but Alanna. Alanna, curled in a ball on the floor beside the nursery chair, little hands pressed over her face.

His hands are covered in blood so he wipes them carefully on one of her bath towels before he reaches out for her.

She curls willingly into his arms as he lifts her up, burying her face against his shirt, sobbing so hard that he can feel her ribs shuddering underneath his hands. "It's okay," he says, pressing his face into her hair, breathing in that beautiful, alive, little girl scent. He draws in a deep, calming breath forcing his nervous system to relax, because she is sensitive enough to pick up on his heartbeat. "She's all gone now." he whispers. "I promise."

"Jasa," she sobs. "Jasa."

"It's okay," he says again. "I'm right here."

He holds her as tightly as she will let him, keeping one hand under her legs and the other on her back, rubbing slow, gentle circles, turning his body far enough so she can no longer see the assassin.

Her sobs finally begin to quiet to occasional sniffles, and then hitches, and then he gently slides his hand up to her head. At the touch of the command she becomes a limp, pliant weight in his arms and he stands up slowly, and places her on her bed.

He brushes the tangled red curls out of her face, and rests his hand on her forehead. He steels himself, carefully.

This will not be easy.

Opening her defenses takes little effort despite Tenel Ka's intensive training, but it feels like reaching a bare hand into liquid nitrogen, icy and clinging, slippery and painfully tight. He takes a deep breath and reaches the tendril in further, tiny flashes of thought brushing past him like wyspfleas.

He feels Alanna's body going rigid; beginning to wake, beginning to struggle, so he presses her down with his other palm, holding her to the bed until he can give her another sleep command, a deeper one, and he feels her relax against him once more.

It seems like years before he finds what he needs, a needle of anguish in an ocean of tranquility but when he brushes past a sharp surge of pain and terror and – Sith, _no_ – _hatred_, he closes around that awful, festering nub in her memory.

A child's mind is not a vid screen so much as it is a timeline. A timeline that exists only within the present moment, written in crumbling ink that will dissolve at the touch of human hands.

Jacen washes the blood from every corner of her mind, until he feels the tiny breath on his palm begin to slow.

Jacen Solo has few gifts to give his only child, so he takes great care to make each one flawless in it's perfection.

**4. Anakin Solo**

It has been a long time since Jacen has been alone.

He has long since grown used to the feeling, to the touch of cold breath that stirs the hair on the back of his neck. To the quiet echo of footsteps long silenced, each sliding into the space between him and air when he moves.

He becomes aware, slowly, when half-seen shades of nothing pass just beyond his field of vision, and pale blue eyes are all that stare out from the mirror when he shaves in the morning.

It is not a daydream that Jacen allows himself very often, this fantasy of crooked smiles long faded. But more often now, it bleeds through his defenses like poison through a faulty chemical mask, congealing at the cracks in the plasteel until he breaks open and breathes it in like oxygen.

Jacen had not witnessed Anakin's funeral. He had died with his brother, long ago on Myrkr, and when he was resurrected, burned alive and remade from boy to man, only shreds of what had once been Anakin remained. He could still catch their glimpses from time to time, in the trapped lines at the corners of his mother's mouth.

The first time that Jacen wakes and finds Anakin there, it surprises him that he has, in fact, been expecting him. Anakin sits beside him at first, with his hands folded and his thin face quiet and soft, as if Jacen were laid out on his death bed. As if it was Anakin who'd held Jacen against his chest there at Myrkr, listening to every breath rattle and choke as his abdominal cavity slowly filled with blood that no one could stop.

"I'm not dying," he tells Anakin, gently, just in case he doesn't know. Anakin smiles a little wanly and he shakes his head.

Anakin comes again the next night, and watches Jacen clean up his kitchen and eat his dinner on the counter alone. Rather than helping him clean up the kitchen again afterwards he sticks his tongue out at Jacen and wanders off into the living room to watch the smashball game instead, and tears burn their way outside Jacen's eyes, and run down his cheeks.

Jacen leaves for three months after that, and Anakin follows him to the uncomfortable starship bunks, curling his thin legs into the bed across from Jacen and falling asleep to the lull of hyperspace drives.

Jacen watches his dark eyelashes move against his cheeks, and it occurs to him that Anakin had always disliked sleeping on spacecraft when he was small. They used to cuddle together like nesting whisperkits, all three of them in one bunk on the falcon that could probably barely fit one of them now, Jaina on one side and Jacen on the other, and they would take turns rubbing Anakin's back until he could sleep in spite of the permeating hum surrounding them.

The unfairness of it hits him in the gut when he doesn't quite expect it, that Anakin is smooth-cheeked and rounded and seventeen years old forever, while Jacen has grown up. While Jacen has become a man.

It occurs to him that he doesn't know anymore, which is the greater tragedy. Anakin only smiles at him, with that pale, fading light in his eyes.

Jacen returns from his mission after three months and finds his apartment empty. It hasn't hurt Jacen in a long time, for it to be so cold and shut and dead, but now he knows that he is the only true ghost, lost and fading around his edges. It is at these times that he knows the truth, and there are no memories strong enough to erase the imprint of it on his chest.

"It's my fault," he sobs, tears burning numb tracks of cold across his cheeks. "I wasn't strong enough to save you."

Anakin only brushes one edge of his hand against Jacen's cheek, just enough so he can feel the light thrum of blood under his skin. "I'm not strong enough to save you either," he says, and their tears mingle together for a long time until he fades on white lines into nothingness.

**5. Jaina Solo**

She's sitting alone in a far corner of the pilots lounge, with a cup of caf on the table and a datapad propped up in front of her.

She doesn't look up when he comes in, and his first thought is that he can easily slip into the commissary and grab a muffin and leave before she notices him.

He's halfway across the room before he feels her eyes on his back.

By the time he comes out her eyes are on her screen again, but focused intently on some invisible spot through the pad, and possibly the table too. Her shoulders are slightly hunched, arms folded defensively across her chest. Classic Jaina Solo.

Well, kriff, he thinks.

He slides the muffin far enough across the table that it just barely misses her datapad. "Hey," he says, carefully nonchalant.

"Watch it," she says, shoving the muffin back at him.

It's probably the closest to an invitation he's going to get, so he pulls the other chair out and sits down across from her.

She doesn't deign to look up of course, but her body relaxes, noticeably.

Well, noticeable to him, anyway.

"So," he says. "You're here early."

She takes a sip of her caf. "I'm here every day," she says.

"Right," Jacen says. Jaina has always been the early riser. He had almost forgotten, in all the time they'd been apart. "I've been here a week, and I haven't seen you," he offers. "Did you just get in?"

"Last night," she says, rubbing a hand across her eyes. "Mission. Chasing pirates with Zekk. Outer rim." She takes another gulp of her caf, and reaches up to swipe a few strands of hair away from her face, focusing her eyes on her datapad again.

They sit for perhaps ten minutes, the only sound the faint whirring of repulsors outside and the light clickclick of Jaina typing. Jacen finishes his muffin, which is dry and stale and crumbles in his hands.

She shuts the datapad suddenly, and stands up, stretching her arms up over her head. "I'm done sitting," she announces. "I need to go stretch. And maybe hit something."

"Oh," he says. He folds the thin paper into his hand, crumbs inside. It doesn't seem right, somehow, to let her slip away just yet. "You don't want any company, do you?"

She shrugs. "If you want to," she says amicably.

The training rooms here are down several levels below the lounge. Jaina clearly knows the way by heart, despite the disorienting shift of gravity fluxes every hundred feet or so. They take a slightly ominous looking turbolift, and she leads him down a dark, narrow hallway after they get off. She stops in front of the third door on the left side, and palms it open.

Jaina strides in, keying open one of the lockers and tossing her datapad into it. She leans down to shove aside a disorganized pile of Jaina-ish junk on the bottom shelf, trying to yank a half-folded white towel out from underneath without capsizing the entire stack.

Over the curve of her back he sees several holographs slid into the chipped slots in the door of her locker.

The one closest to the top is their parents standing on the balcony of their old Coruscant apartment, young enough that their hair is still mostly brown, as it blows lightly in the breeze. Every few seconds their father wraps his arm around their mother's shoulders, and they smile.

The next is of a sleepy-looking Anakin at about thirteen years old, sprawled across their long-gone family sofa, blinking up at the camera with a slightly bemused expression. He reaches up with a skinny hand, frowning in annoyance at whoever was taking the holograph.

He reaches over Jaina to pry the third one from where it's fallen, slightly hidden under what looks like a half-written report and a torn scribbled-on flimsy signed by Tahiri.

It's a fairly recent holo of Jaina and Zekk, sitting side by side on a rotting log in an unfamiliar clearing, attempting to share what looks like a ration bar. Every so often one of them looks up, and Zekk puts his arm around Jaina, and they crowd in close with slightly silly, dirty-faced smiles.

Jaina straightens up with her towel and a clean shirt at last and takes the holo out of his hand, sticking it back into its place beside the others. "Family," she says, gesturing vaguely towards the group.

"Oh," says Jacen. Something small and sharp slides in just underneath his ribs, probing up between muscle and bone and he blinks hard, trying to let the hurt slide out and away.

She shuts the locker with a sharp bang and tosses her towel up over her shoulder. "You coming?" she asks, already starting off down the hallway.

He follows her out into the circular training room, watching as she sets down her things in the corner and picks up her lightsaber, tossing it lightly from hand to hand. "So," she says. "Feel like sparring a little? It's been a while for you and me."

"Sure," Jacen says, slowly, trying to ignore the slow-curling knot of foreboding in the pit of his stomach. The room feels decidedly off suddenly, from the pale, too-dim lighting, to Jaina's faint, off-kilter smile.

He goes to the other end where the raised red light shines up from the floor, signaling the match about to begin.

A soft tone sounds, and she starts moving towards him, bouncing lightly from foot to foot, lightsaber still silent in her hand. "So," she says, flicking the button lightly with a twitch of a finger. "Where have you been lately anyway? I haven't even seen you in six months."

He turns on his own lightsaber, moving around to the right of Jaina, just enough to keep her on guard without openly threatening her. "Oh…" _Hapes, of course_. "Just… around. You know me."

The light from their blades shifts a little as she moves in closer, and he almost misses the quick flash of anger across her face a split second before she strikes, full on. "Right," she says, pulling back just far enough for another hard slash.

He moves back and thrusts towards her chest, attempting to drive her back towards her own corner but she's already moving around beside him, slashing in for another cut towards his neck. She's too fast this time, and he doesn't see the feint until it's almost too late to block, and her lightsaber comes within a centimeter of taking the skin off his forearm.

"Hey!" he says, moving back out of her reach, shifting his lightsaber to his other hand. "What the kriff was that?"

Jaina flips her lightsaber in one hand so it spins around twice in a circle, still dancing back and forth, just barely remaining on her side of the training circle. "Sorry," she says lightly, a slight smile trying to fight its way onto her face.

Well, fine. If that's how she wants to play.

He lunges forward and she blocks again, pushing him back hard enough that they both end up close to the far wall. He feels sweat starting to trickle down his back already, his breath coming harder. It was always a mistake to crowd her; she'd learned early on to take advantage of any tendency towards reliance on superior size and strength, which far too many of her opponents fell into without hesitation.

He dives in underneath, and she reacts instantly, too fast, and before she can move he pivots around their interlocked blades and slides his foot behind hers. She twists to escape but he pushes her backwards before she can kick him. She goes down hard, curling instinctively to protect her stomach and still managing to block his next strike, aimed at her throat.

She struggles to move but he shoves his foot against her ribs, forcing her back down to the mat with the edge of his boot. He grinds in as hard as he can, and she makes a small noise as all the air is forced out of her lungs.

She stares up at him, eyes narrowed, sweaty, matted hair falling out of her tail. He listens to her panting slowly, feels the muscles in her chest push out against his foot, and then sink back in.

Slowly, he becomes aware of the frantic beeping of the match monitor, and its repeating, automated voice.

"…_ave exceeded the limitations of your training match. Please return to you designated positions. You have exceeded the limitations of…_"

A sudden line of dizziness coils at the back of his skull. Jacen raises a hand and shuts down the system, and the lights go dark.

Jaina pushes aside his foot at last and struggles to her feet, slowly. He can see the beginnings of a bruise just beneath the neck of her tank, red and purple and black already blooming together in a foot-shaped half-circle mark under her skin.

"Oh," he says. "Jaina…"

"Forget it," she says, pushing past him and walking back over to the side.

She picks up her towel, wiping the sweat off her face and neck and reaching back to retie her hair. He remembers how it felt to press into her skin, to feel those thin capillaries tearing beneath the jagged plasteel of his boot.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he says, but the words feel like cotton in his mouth.

Jaina turns around to look at him finally. Sweaty strands of hair poke out from her messy tail, and her mouth is tight and small. "You won," she says. "And that's all that really matters, isn't it Jacen?"

Jacen stays where he is, a slow, icy sensation curling beneath his spine. It would be ridiculous now, to protest. Ridiculous to point at her like Ben would have, like Anakin would have, and say 'you started it. It was _your_ fault.'

It didn't even matter.

It was a test.

And he had failed.

She shoulders her bag without looking at him again, tossing a small, black cylinder in his direction. "Close up when you're done," she says.

The door closes behind her, and he hears the lock clank, shudder, and seal.

Jacen stands in the silence for a long time, until the light from Calinar's sun fades from the bulkhead and only the stars remain visible.


End file.
